The Queen of Cups

Apparently my potential and goal for the year should be the queen of cups. (I had a tarot reading done the other night, and this was the card that was to represent moi.) It fit. That's exactly who I want to be, and as I peer into my glass it is hard to separate cynicism from intuition. Maybe I've seen enough to know what to avoid? Or maybe the void will fill with more worthwhile things now that I know a bit more about the flow.

Or maybe, maybe each minute of life seems so precious now that it's hard to know how to be the perfect queen of cups. Drink, see, offer, be.

My latest therapy is kittens and living in a beautiful house with lovely people.

My last two nights went to partial waste. Wash your hands, water's gone, weekend's gone.

Boa noite. Drink to worthwhile time, and time not regretted but savored.

and now

Morning. I'm behind and I can never catch up: that's how it feels sometimes. Life's too quick, short and brutal. And I have to stop for sleep and food. This marathon is almost over.

Some boxes to pack and last words to record. As if I'm covering something sacred?

I'm a really imperfect detective and I'm not the chipper Angela Lansbury type. I'm more like the lonely man version, (Hercule Poirot maybe?) sipping his whisky cynically in a random bar as he examines the other beings around him and takes a break. But he can never really take a break because people tire him out. They zap the life force from him because he's not relaxed enough, he's always talking to people but never fully connected. Aw, that's so sad, right.

Well, it's ok. I'm past the deep brooding whiskey point hopefully. And the mystery is less mysterious certainly.

bonne nuit quand meme

I wonder how many of us there are - there must be hundreds, thousands? People who self-induce insomnia because the internet is so distracting and attractive and seductive and the day never seems long enough. (Tiring as it is!)

The day just stretches on and on and it's hard to turn off a day sometimes. To cut off wakefulness can feel like giving up when there's too much to do. Or maybe it's because you want to do just one more thing, and just one more, and one more before finally your fatigue takes over so ov

er

whelmingl

y

In wonderland

I used to think that location mattered ever so much. I switch mine repeatedly, almost compulsively. I am dreaming about the psychology of movement. Like a rat in a maze, why not try to find that ever-elusive piece of cheese, memorize the walls, find it faster, faster. If we keep changing up the path, go to the fromagerie at the corner, switch it up to the Monoprix, or the grocery store in Hyde Park or Auckland or Brighton or Brighton Beach or the 5th arrondissement of Paris what difference does it make?
The truth is objects are just that. What matters is how you feel, who you love, do you see yourself reflected in the eyes of others - do you exist?

Streets, rues, avenues, and the prize at the end. I seem to keep wanting to confuse myself, to remind myself that geography is pointless.

admitting and tossing addictions that rot the brain - TSAA

I'm going to admit it right here and now and then I'm going to destroy it, somehow.

Ever since I was a little kid growing up in the States, I was highly engaged by television. A little too highly. Yeah, that rotten black box with the fictional people and their fictional lives inside. You can forget yours, why live yours when you can watch theirs?

This is possibly one of the scariest aspects of the entertainment industry. Entertainment can go beyond occasional amusement to complete and total consumption of your life. The consumer is consumed by the box. The brain matter is wasted: simulating the lives of others, you live your own that much less. Your mirror neurons allow you to experience a percentage of that luscious, thrilling kiss between the two beautiful lovers, the pathways activating your lips, tongue muscles and salivary glands are lit up, your heart too, palpitates a little. You feel a percentage of the heat and love on the screen, the excitement, pain, fury, happiness, anticipation -- you are living their created lives.

Possible hypothesis and question: are those of us with more active mirror neurons, with a higher capacity for empathy, more susceptible to tv shows and soaps? After all, that could explain why some people get lured in more than others. Why some of us swoon with the characters from the get-go while others are relatively unaffected and uninterested.

There is quite likely at least a correlation here, more empathy = more soap-susceptibility.

The second key ingredient that sucks viewers in is the ongoing storyline. An ongoing storyline is like a life, it goes on and on, there is no definite end (as with a movie,) those characters continue to exist and they ask you to exist with them. It's scary, they're asking to be incorporated into your life, you into theirs. Suddenly, 6pm central time on Tuesday, you are no longer you, you are Rori Gilmore, you are Hiro Nakumura. You are sucked in. That's why there are "favorite characters." They're not just favorites, they are us, we are them; we love them because more than anything we want to be them, we want to live their lives. And at 6 o'clock central time we do.

All through college I had no tv access and did beautifully, and I was happy to be living tv-free, to be filling my free time with much more fulfilling things - books, people, places, poetry. During the two years after college I watched on occasion but not so much, I watched films a lot more but I didn't get too tv-happy and this was excellent. I got into the Colbert Report and the Daily Show which I used to watch during lunch breaks at one of my admin gigs and that was about it. A life not too intruded upon by fictional tv people.

Then during this past difficult, stressful first PhD year, (also the first year that I have lived completely alone,) when alone and tired I have been sucked into the streaming tv shows online and this is a habit I need to kick, hard. I think I'm particularly sucked in by shows about powerful women, superwomen more or less: Ugly Betty, Dollhouse, Alias, Heroes, Desperate Housewives, United States of Tara. (All of these shows and their gorgeoug no-bullshit female characters entered my life this year, and superficially filled the emotional gaps for episodes and seasons at a time.) This way, I can pretend that I'm kicking the world's ass when when I'm not, I'm just sitting on mine. Important note: these superwomen have very full social lives and no time to mope around in their studios, I was going on their dates, living their romances, and advancing their careers....

It's a catch, a terrible one. Particularly in this modern lonely tuna can existence. It's an easy drug, a virtual world where all the lines have been written, there is no need to stress, it will all be done for you, lived for you.

Kick it, destroy it, stop it. Be the superwoman instead of watching her, or at least be the woman, that can be more than enough.

Frangulation

Sink humping

was discussed this evening

my fault: as the pub ladies inspired

a bit of sharing about my expertise.

The female orgasm is always a topic piquant et parfait.

Et maintenant en francais:
Ce soir comme d'habitude

les mecs francais avec ses penis francais ses mots francais

ses visages et jugements vachement francais...

ce soir j'ai me senti jeune et vielle aux meme temps:

parfait.

Comme un dessert, parfait. C'est ca.

Et la je te dis

que toi tu seras jamais l'homme

qui j'adore toujours l'homme qui m'ennui

comme la plupart des hommes

bah, comme d'habitude.

J'suis honnete. Ma pet.

So so now that franglais has entered

the flow what will you do ma petite

chou-chou

that's what the sleazy older guy kept

calling the teen with her teeny legs

all tan, squeaky clean.

I will tell you that men

and mecs sont partis dans le monde

de mes reves ou cauchemars

ou on va se voir,

meme si je ne veux pas.

Meme si je ne veux pas.

power trips and paninis

Hello Paris. You are a sparkling majestic damsel of a city that always lives in my heart and charms me into sighing at your never-waning,

at your never waning.

You are perfect and blue and dark dark like night when

your brasseries beam and your falafel joints wink

turkish, eurasian, african, subsumed under versace

and versailles.

Paris.

You pull me into your rich arms and taunt me,

a reckless lover, never another

as full of luxurious svelte

melt me, dear city of de-lights

open up your beggar's palms and cathedral calls

take me under the bridge,

curve me up the thighs of your boats,

swallow me into your jazzy caverns

and crevices creeping with people

little ants in the fantasy maze.

I crawl to you and propose

have me.

connect and disconnect

I hate scripts. Social scripts that we follow: what is ok to say now, what isn't. 

Step 1: Ask her out to dinner.

Step 2: Ask her to your home.

Step 3: Kissing followed by sex? Dinner followed by intimacy? Love as a consummation of stipulated, presupposed social processes? Or just, just that I feel too disconnected from the whole process to connect to it any more? Or just, that I am still in love with someone else or someone in my head or, or, my heart where the hell is my heart?

I want to jump out of an airplane, I want my parachute to cruise me over the flowing, cold, windy beauty of the world. I want to be unencumbered of presupposed body and self.

Place labels on the woman, she is supposed to enjoy them: beautiful, smart, beautiful, cute, very cute. Beautiful. Bonita. Belle. Krasavitsa.

I want to laugh, laugh past the social ramifications, I want to laugh like a child free of the rules of sociality, playing, enjoying, imagining. That's what I look for in a man. 

My heart is still so crushed, like that island of stilled lava. Tiri Tiri Matangi. Black shards of surreality, that is my heart. Betwixt the lava rock exotic growths are sprouting, reaching for the sky. My heart is an island in transition. 

On Nuclear Families/Wars

What is family? The nuclear family is too tight-knit for relationships to work unless you all happen to get along. Unless your personalities cosmically match up. Lucky bastards.

I decided to go skiing with my family for a weekend, it was supposed to be a break from my stressful, overly intense grad school life in which I get too much and too little done and meet too few and too many people and feel too lazy, inadequate yet somehow sharp and creative at the same time. An ongoing struggle. I always just want people to "get" me. So my attempts to hone language and to create unusual, vivid metaphor since early childhood have probably been my ongoing cry for understanding. There is the hope that if the words are piercing and unique and human and strong enough, that we will connect, that you will get closer to my consciousness. That this alone-ness will lose some of the alone as we connect in a closer understanding of the other. 

Get me? 

I did have a good time the first two days. Then my mother had to lose it and be unbelievably rude and insensitive. This callousness of hers has always been the pitfall of our relationship. I have never and will never be able to put up with it. I just don't put up. That's not how I function. I get incredibly upset with her laziness in controlling her own words, not that my control has ever been perfect, but then again she is usually feeling justified in her rude outpourings, during and after. 

You cannot teach your mom new tricks. You cannot teach yourself new ways to feel. Sometimes, the sad truth is that you are stuck in painful repetition. Sometimes progress just doesn't happen. I am always dying to bring more empathy into her brain, to get those mirror neurons working harder, creating my reality and pain in her brain. It just doesn't work. I've been trying to since I was a little kid. I felt this inability of hers to be a proper mirror as incredibly painful, and injust. But maybe it's because she just can't do it, not that she doesn't want to, but that she can't. There can be a painful separation between people, when the walls between our separate consciousnesses seem impossibly thick. 

I always want to bring consciousnesses together, but this fusion of reality is hard to forge. What do we want? Who are we? Do you want to be me and do I want to be you and are we? I was in love and felt inseparable. In love was a chance for me to fuse realities in the way I guess I am always kind of trying to do. Become me, become you. 

I guess I hate being misconstrued and caricatured...there is so much projection here. 

Labeled, ugh. The labels, the mean power dynamics within family, not my bag, baby.

Competition starts within the family when parents pit their children against each other in a battle of compliments and ridicule. The family in this sense can be a constant war, a constant modern competition to prove yourself again and again, sans end. Forget those warm, loving images in which family is supposed to be cuddly love and good times. Encouragement, fun and games...the family is also where some of the most painful modern struggles occur. 

Yes, I love mine and find them in many ways to be impressive and wonderful. I am not saying that all I see is the struggle and pain that can be caused. I'm just having a so-so night, I am hurt by bullshit...too easily, but that's beside the point, I just am. 

Salut from the Regenstein

I'm happy in the library. Does that sound like an unlikely sentence? I don't really care. I am. 

Not only in the library, but in my apartment (which incidentally has many practical issues that I have neglected, it is time to call my lovely Croatian maintenance mafia again,) in Hyde Park, Chicago, the University of Chicago, here, today, now hello. Happy. 

I'm working on a midterm paper, the topic is Ebonics. Language, identity, nationalism, culture, self issues - questions that interest me. 

Reading over my last entry, it was soaked with Michael Silversteinian linguistic anthropology language(I mentioned deixis which is a linguistic term for locatability in time and space)...whew, last quarter was tough but I have come out smarter. Now I have to keep getting smarter, sharper, full of the intellectual tools that will allow me to probe the questions that stir souls. That may sound corny, but like the Mexican spoken word artist I saw tonight, I don't care. It's like Hogwarts but much more intense. Magical, powerful forces, spells, modern witchcraft that self-reflects. I used to secretly dream of knowing every language, of knowing everything really, of stirring the world with insight, it's like this super nerdy idea of paradise where knowledge penetrates, validates, harmonizes and connects everything. My paradise is knowing and learning. Understanding.

Omniscience is not possible, if it were, if there were some knowable limit, then it would all be so much less exciting. It's limitless, and that's fun. There is no end, there is an end to a human life but there is no end to the learnable, the knowable. There is an endless drive that connects us. Maybe this was part of that connection, that transnational, all-encompassing pantheism-like feeling, that I've had at times, the way I imagined it, my sense of spirituality.

Yep, I'm in a super corny, humanity-loving mood, and it's all good. Be a Jesus, an Anne Frank, be nice people, it does go around.